The Spanish film industry churns out up to 100 features a year. Of these we in the UK get to see perhaps four or five. And as far as famous Spanish directors go - well, there's really just the one: Pedro Almodóvar, currently in Lanzarote shooting his 17th feature.

For the great majority of films that don't come trailing the seductive slogan "Un film de Almodóvar", foreign distribution is a tough sell. Ironically, it seems, one super-sized name can capsize a national film industry by monopolising international interest.

This is why the London Spanish Film Festival, which comes to an end this Friday at the Cine Lumiere, is important. Along with Manchester's longer established Viva festival, it gives a flavour of what lies beyond planet Pedro.

The big story emerging from this year's fest is the pull between the national and the international. Some of the best films still rely heavily on local references and contexts. For example, the festival held an extended tribute to actor-director Fernando Fernán Gómez, who died last November. It's a fair bet the name means little to UK audiences. Some may have seen his cameo as Penélope Cruz's Alzheimer-stricken father in Almodóvar's All About My Mother. Others may think back to Belle époque (1992), where he once more played parent to the young 'Pe' (as the Spanish press call her). Yet with 200 features clocked up over half a century, Fernan Gomez was regarded as one of the best-loved figures in Spanish cinema.

Other films exhibit a curious combination of home and away. Friends of Jesús by first time director Antonio Muñoz de Mesa, is a rough-hewn comedy of blokes abroad. When the titular anti-hero breaks up with his girlfriend, his mates take him off to New York on vacation. You may not be surprised to learn that these four lusty young men are not quite as supportive of each other as the female quartet in Sex and the City.

At the other end of the cinematic spectrum is La soledad ('Solitary Fragments'), which won big at the Spanish Oscars earlier this year. The story of a single mother who leaves the provinces for the capital, this slow-paced, split-screen indie might be read as an international art movie. Its uncompromising austerity (static camera, punishingly long takes) evokes distant memories of Bresson or Dreyer. Yet just when you began to think that nothing would happen (viewers were shifting uncomfortably in their seats), a terrible event occurs, indelibly linked to the recent history of Madrid.

One final film also boasts a disturbing twist in the tail. King of the Hill, to be distributed in the UK by the reliably canny Optimum, is a machine-tooled thriller as brutally violent and effective as any US equivalent. Its premise is all too simple. A young driver (charismatic Leonardo Sbaraglia) gets lost in remote countryside and is shot at by mysterious marksmen. He's pursued through the forest over the entire length of the film, which features some excruciatingly tense - but wholly anonymous - set pieces.